I updated it along with updating wordpress to 3.0.3 the other day. I fired off the Broken Links Checker, and as it usually takes a while, I ignored it and went on playing Eve and writing some ruby code (a simple little project to organize a whole lot of files into 4.7GB disks and include manifests and md5s of all the files for an archive. Still doesn’t work yet.) The next morning, I woke up to a large amount of email. I figured it was just spam or something that was significantly different than the normal spam. Unfortunately it was notifications from my Nagios telling me that the box doesn’t respond to ssh or http anymore. Uh oh.

Luckily, I’m running Xen, so it is trivial to get to the console over ssh. I connect to the console and try to log in. The box is totally wedged. OOM Killer had gone crazy with httpd, and anything else that was on that box. So xm destroy. Fire it back up again, wait for it to replay all the transactions, and it had decided to check the disks, since they haven’t been checked in 214 days. All came back up fine. Nagios was again satisfied. However, none of the sites worked. “Error: Cannot access database.” Oh noes. Started the normal debugging process, looking through logs and what not. Found a bunch of local requests from Broken Links Checker checking links. It appears that it caused a DOS to myself. Wonderful. Still no luck with MySQL, so I tried to connect to the mysql server via the command line, I had already determined that it was up, and it’s on a different box, so it didn’t get oom killed when apache killed the box. I get an error telling me that MySQL was denying connections from this host due to too many errors. So a flush-hosts later, and it all works again. Fun.

Guess I should set up some kind of resource limits for Apache on that box. Also, I’m removing that Broken Links Checker plugin, I don’t need to find my broken links that badly…

The problem here is not that this was all done in a panic. The problem is not that there are evil people. There will always be evil people. The problem is not that it doesn’t have enough oversight.

The problem is that it was done at all. This money is going to be poorly managed compared to someone’s hard earned dollars. There’s no cost to these polititcians spending this money. They don’t care how the money is spent, only that it results in their being reelected next time.

The thing is, no one even considered the consequences of this stimulus. Well, no one in the federal government.

We THE PEOPLE should be very angry. We should be making this anger known to the Federal Government. They need to know that we don’t like what they’re doing. And if you do like what they’re doing, keep in mind that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. What seems good for you right now comes at what cost to others? When does that cost come around to you?